DOCSLIB.ORG

Course Description an Examination of Philosophical Issues on the Theme of Relativism. Are Moral Standards Relative to Cultures A

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Course Description an Examination of Philosophical Issues on the Theme of Relativism. Are Moral Standards Relative to Cultures A Course Description An examination of philosophical issues on the theme of relativism. Are moral standards relative to cultures and/or moral frameworks? Are there incompatible or non-comparable ways of thinking about the world that are somehow equally good? Is science getting closer to the truth? Is rationality -- the notion of a good reason to believe something -- relative to cultural norms? What are selves? Is there a coherent form of relativism about the self? Discussion of these questions through the writings of contemporary philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Gilbert Harman, Judith Thomson, and Derek Parfit. Emphasis on ways of making these vague questions precise, and critical evaluation of philosophical arguments. Texts Perry, John. A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Harman, Gilbert, and Judith Jarvis Thomson. Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3 ed. Additional Readings Pryor, James. "How to Write a Philosophy Paper." Blackburn, Simon. "The World." Popper, Karl. Selections from Logic of Scientific Discovery. Putnam, Hilary. "The 'Corroboration' of Theories." Alston, William. "Yes, Virginia, There Is A Real World." Assignments There is a reading assignment for each class meeting. These are often relatively short, but many require close study, and you should not postpone them. In accordance with HASS- D regulations, you will be expected to write approximately 20 pages. These will be divided among 4 papers (the HASS-D requirement is at least 3). There will sometimes be short reading quizzes or study questions for the recitation sections. You must complete these in order to pass the course. You are encouraged to discuss the writing assignments (and, of course, also the reading assignments) with each other, but the written work you submit must be entirely your own. Your papers should not contain quotations or quotations masquerading as proper paraphrases: a statement of the ideas of one of the authors you've read must be couched in your own words. Do not use any footnotes. There will be no prizes for writing in anything other than plain English. Finally, remember that we want you to think seriously about the issues, and formulate and defend your own opinions. Your TAs will be looking for evidence of this. Debates The course divides into three parts. At the end of each part we will hold an in-class debate. Everyone is expected to participate. Examination In accordance with HASS-D regulations, in addition to the writing assignments you will be required to take a 3-hour final exam covering material dealt with throughout the term. The final exam will account for a substantial portion of the grade. The exam will be open book and open notes, at a time and place to be announced. There will be no mid-term exam. Grading 60% papers, 25% final exam, 15% class and section participation. Subject Matter This course is primarily intended for those students who have not had any previous exposure to philosophy. It treats a small number of important philosophical questions in some depth. (For more breadth andless depth, try 24.00, Problems of Philosophy.) The question that will occupy us for the first part is: (1) What kinds of things are persons? Persisting soul pellets, living bodies, brains, or what? You no doubt think that whether you survive some upcoming event (say a heart operation) is of great importance: normally, death is a bad thing. In a remarkable book, Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit has argued that the right answer to (1) implies that, sometimes, you ought not to care at all about your survival: sometimes, death is as good as life. We shall examine Parfit's argument and critical reactions to it. The second part will consider this question: (2) Are moral standards absolute or in some sense relativistic? Harman and Thomson's Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity takes the form of a debate about the question (Harman being the moral relativist, and Thomson the moral objectivist). It's self contained, and mostly very clear and accessible. We will read and discuss more or less the entire book. The question that is central to the third part is: (3) Is the truth about external reality absolute or observer-relative? Science seems to show that external objects are not colored or sweet in themselves but only in relation to human observers (Blackburn). This concedes to science the task of saying what objects are like "in themselves," but Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions casts doubt even on that. We end by asking (with Alston) what remains of objective reality when the philosophers are done. Aim By the end of the course you should be able to see your way through the swirling fog of metaphor that often surrounds these issues to a reasonably precise formulation of the central questions. You should also have some familiarity with the way in which a philosophical problem arises, and techniques by means of which one might try to solve it. And, with a bit of luck, you might even end up with strong philosophical views yourself. A Note on the Readings None of them are easy: they are not introductions to philosophy but rather examples of it. If you have trouble understanding what an author says, or any other question concerning the course, please do not hesitate to ask. A Note on Class Participation This is strongly encouraged. Talking about philosophy is one of the best ways of doing it. It is much better to say something you later realize is mistaken than never to say it at all. A Note on Feedback Your comments and criticism, expressed either to myself or the TAs, are most welcome. Web Resources On writing, see Jim Pryor's Guidelines on writing a philosophy paper. Useful glossaries are Jim Pryor's Philosophical Terms and Methods and the Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is good, although nowhere near complete. An instructive site to browse is David Chalmers' Web site. See the MIT Philosophy page for colloquia dates, other course information, etc. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Plato's Republic and Stoicism CHRISTOPHER GILL I. Introduction In
    Colloquium 6 Ethical Reflection and the Shaping of Character: Plato's Republic and Stoicism CHRISTOPHER GILL I. Introduction In this article I explore a striking, and perhaps paradoxical, feature of Greek ethical thought. This is that, in at least two areas of Greek philosophy (Plato's Republic and Stoicism), a complex and credible model of ethical development is combined with an ideal type of character which is often seen as hopelessly unrealistic, and perhaps positively repellent: the ideal which the Stoics call apatheia, or 'absence of passion.' By examining certain aspects of Platonic and Stoic thinking, I aim to bring out both the credibility of their model of ethical development and also the plausibility of the idea that this development might lead to a form of apatheia that is not wholly repellent. The model of ethical development, in broad outline, is a two-stage one: first, the development of pre-reflective virtue, through an upbringing and participation in interpersonal and communal relationships; then that of post-reflective virtue, through systematic ethical debate or dialectic, a form of virtue based on, but deepening or modifying, pre-reflective virtue.1 This model can be subdivided into On this model, and the alternative Greek model, in which reflection is a prerequisite for virtue, see Gill 1996b, 4.6, 5.7; also, on the characteristic structures of thinking in Greek ethical philosophy, Annas 1993, esp. chs. 1 and 22. Here, as elsewhere, I use 'her/him' and 'he/she' indifferently as indefinite two versions. The first is represented by Aristotle's ethical writings, especially the Nicomachean Ethics, and Stoic theory, at least in one prevalent pattern? In this version, the development towards pre- reflective virtue can occur, in principle, within conventional societies; post-reflective virtue may modify pre-reflective virtue, but needs to be based on this.
    [Show full text]
  • Non-Religious Ethics? a Critical Notice of Derek Parfit, on What Matters
    Non-Religious Ethics? A critical notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Rosen, Michael. 2013. “Non-Religious Ethics? A critical notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21, no. 5: 755–772. Published Version doi:10.1080/09672559.2013.857818 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12967839 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP Non-Religious Ethics? A critical notice of Derek Parfit, On What Matters The History Workshop was a movement of radical social historians which flourished in Britain in the 1960s and 70s. Its goal was to promote “history from below” – to tell the stories of those left out of conventional narratives, and, at the same time, to open up the practice of history itself. Anyway, when the group decided to start a journal, there was a debate over whether it should carry book reviews. Weren’t book reviews – the ranking of others’ work, delivered in a tone of apparent omniscience – examples of exactly the kind of academic gate-keeping against which they had set themselves? So, in its early issues at least, the History Workshop Journal didn’t carry reviews but “Enthusiasms” – contributions in which someone would introduce a new book to readers in positive terms, without pretending to be marking it in some transcendental Prize Fellowship Examination.
    [Show full text]
  • Is Psychology What Matters in Survival?
    This is a repository copy of Is Psychology What Matters in Survival?. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/164032/ Version: Published Version Article: Gustafsson, Johan orcid.org/0000-0002-9618-577X (2020) Is Psychology What Matters in Survival? Australasian Journal of Philosophy. pp. 1-14. ISSN 1471-6828 https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2020.1791193 Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Australasian Journal of Philosophy ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rajp20 Is Psychology What Matters in Survival? Johan E. Gustafsson To cite this article: Johan E. Gustafsson (2020): Is Psychology What Matters in Survival?, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2020.1791193 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2020.1791193 © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 19 Oct 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 209 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rajp20 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2020.1791193 Is Psychology What Matters in Survival? Johan E.
    [Show full text]
  • Derek Parfit (Excerpted from Reasons and Persons, 1984, Pgs
    The Badness of Extinction by Derek Parfit (excerpted from Reasons and Persons, 1984, pgs. 453-454) I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes: (1) Peace. (2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world's existing population. (3) A nuclear war that kills 100%. (2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater. My view is held by two very different groups of people. Both groups would appeal to the same fact. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second. One of the groups who holds my view are Classical Utilitarians. They would claim … that the destruction of mankind would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes. The badness of this crime would lie in the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness. Another group would agree, but for very different reasons.
    [Show full text]
  • Wlodek Rabinowicz Derek Parfit's Contributions to Philosophy
    Wlodek Rabinowicz Derek Parfit's contributions to Philosophy Article (Accepted version) (Refereed) Original citation: Rabinowicz, Wlodek (2016) Derek Parfit's contributions to Philosophy. Theoria, 82 (2). pp. 104-109. ISSN 0040-5825 DOI: 10.1111/theo.12088 © 2016 Stiftelsen Theoria This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/66819/ Available in LSE Research Online: June 2016 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. Derek Parfit’s Contributions to Philosophy Wlodek Rabinowicz In 2014, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Derek Parfit the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. In its motivation, the Academy stressed Parfit’s ground-breaking contributions to theory of personal identity, population ethics and analysis of the structure of moral theories. The list of philosophers and logicians who have received the Rolf Schock Prize is as yet relatively short.
    [Show full text]
  • PARFIT's MISTAKEN METAETHICS Michael Smith in the First Volume of on What Matters, Derek Parfit Defends a Distinctive Metaethica
    PARFIT'S MISTAKEN METAETHICS Michael Smith In the first volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit defends a distinctive metaethical view, a view that specifies the relationships he sees between reasons, facts, beliefs, desires, aims, actions, and values. Parfit's metaethical view is a version of what he calls 'Objectivism', and he explicitly argues not just for his preferred version of Objectivism, but against all versions of Subjectivism, the metaethical view with which Objectivism is contrasted. Parfit's arguments for Objectivism, and his criticisms of Subjectivism, seem to me to be mistaken, so my aim is to identify where the mistakes lie. Though I do not expect Parfit to agree with me that the mistakes I identify are mistakes, I proceed on the assumption that this does not matter. The best we can do when we engage with philosophers like Parfit, whose detailed metaethical views are part and parcel of a comprehensive worldview with mutually supporting parts, is to state very carefully where our fundamental disagreements with them lie. 1. Reasons Fundamentalism and reasons for belief At the very beginning of On What Matters, Parfit tells us: We can have reasons to believe something, to do something, to have some desire or aim, and to have many other attitudes and emotions, such as fear, regret, and hope. Reasons are given by facts, such as the fact that someone's finger-prints are on some gun, or that calling an ambulance would save someone's life. It is hard to explain the concept of a reason, or what the phrase 'a reason' means.
    [Show full text]
  • Solving Parfit's Puzzles
    Solving Parfit’s Puzzles In Part IV of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit explores moral questions regarding future generations. His thought-provoking analysis raises several problems for our most intuitive beliefs about future generations. Of the many puzzles Parfit raises, I will focus on two: The Non-Identity Problem and the Repugnant Conclusion. Both these puzzles are alarming. As I intend to demonstrate, Parfit’s puzzles can be solved by appealing to non-consequentialist principles1. In the sections to follow, I will explicate the arguments Parfit uses to establish his puzzles. I will then provide arguments against some of Parfit’s conclusions and reply to the counterarguments of which I am aware. I Drawing from a mere biological fact regarding human reproduction, Parfit introduces one of the most puzzling issues in contemporary moral thinking: the Non-Identity Problem. Anyone with a basic understanding of biology would agree that the human organism grows from a particular ovum fertilized by a particular spermatozoon. Because there are perhaps millions of possible sperm and egg combinations, Parfit believes The Time-Dependence Claim: If any particular person had not been conceived when he was in fact conceived, it is in fact true that he would never have existed.2 In making this claim, Parfit is strengthening the The Parent-Dependence Claim: If any particular person had not been conceived by the man and woman he was in fact conceived by, it is in fact true that he would never have existed. To illustrate the basis of the Non-Identity Problem, we can turn to the popular science fiction film Back to the Future.3 The film properly employs the Time-Dependence Claim in the plot line of the story.
    [Show full text]
  • An Interview with Shelly Kagan
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, Volume 11, Issue 2, Autumn 2018, pp. 245-283. https://doi.org/10.23941/ejpe.v11i2.379 Thinking by Drawing: An Interview With Shelly Kagan SHELLY KAGAN (Chicago, 1954) is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Kagan received a BA in Philosophy and Religion from Wesleyan University in 1976 and a PhD from Princeton University in 1981. His PhD thesis, on the limits of what morality can demand, was supervised by Professor Thomas Nagel. Kagan’s research is in normative ethics. He is the author of The Limits of Morality (1989), Normative Ethics (1998a), Death (2012a), The Geometry of Desert (2012b), and How to Count Animals, more or less (forthcoming). His work has appeared in various journals, including Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Videos of Kagan’s course on death have been very popular online. Kagan is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the advisory board of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) interviewed Kagan about his formative years (section I); his work on death (section II), the moral status of animals (section III), and desert (section IV); his views on convergence in philosophy (section V); and his advice for graduate students in moral philosophy (section VI). I. Formative years EJPE: Professor Kagan, what first drew you to philosophy? SHELLY KAGAN: I was interested in Jewish religious thought from an early age.
    [Show full text]
  • Desire-Based Reasons, Naturalism and Tolerable Revisionism: Lessons from Moore and Parfit
    DESIRE-BASED REASONS, NATURALISM AND TOLERABLE REVISIONISM: LESSONS FROM MOORE AND PARFIT Attila Tanyi Universidad de Estocolmo 1. Naturalism and the Model In the theory of normative reasons one particular approach enjoys wides- pread support: the Desire-based Reasons Model (from now on: the Model). The Model, moreover, typically comes with an ethical naturalist (from now on: naturalist) background. Ethical naturalists hold that normative judgments owe their normativity to the facts they refer to in the natural world. Not everyone is happy with this claim, however. The most influential argument launched against naturalism is G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument (OQA). But recently Derek Parfit has joined Moore in rejecting naturalism by employing a knock-down argument — the Triviality Objection (TO) - against naturalism per se. My aim in this paper is to investigate to what extent these objections can be used to reject the Model. To this end, we first need a sui- table account of what naturalism is and in this context we then have to locate the Model; then we can turn to the objections mentioned. In this paper I am concerned with what is often called substantive natu- ralism. (Railton 1990, p. 155; 1993b, p. 315) On this view naturalism is un- derstood as proposing an account of normative properties in terms of natural properties or relations.1 Substantive naturalism involves three approaches: analytical naturalism, non-analytical naturalism and one-term naturalism. (Dancy 2005, 126) Analytical naturalism holds that normative properties are natural properties and the two, normative and descriptive ways of capturing them are synonymous.
    [Show full text]
  • An Interview with Derek Parfit
    16 DEREK PARFIT Derek Parfit is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of the controversial and widely acclaimed book Reasons and Persons. Derek Parfit (interview 1995) is the subject of a volume of papers edited by Jonathan Dancy, Reading Parfit (1997), in the series, Philosophers and their Critics. Cogito: We usually start these interviews by asking our interviewees something about what turned their interests towards philosophy. Was there some particular person, or problem, or work, that made you a philosopher? Parfit: Yes, there was. As an undergraduate, I did only modern history. Then I read David Wiggins’s book, Identity and Spatiotemporal Continuity, and in particular his discussion of the actual cases in which the hemispheres of people’s brains have been disconnected, in attempts to treat epilepsy. As a result, these people seem to have two quite separate streams of thoughts and experience, in having each of which they are unaware of the other. Wiggins then imagined a case in which the two halves of our brain would be successfully transplanted into a pair of empty skulls, and there would later be two people each of whom has half our brain and is fully psychologically continuous with us. Since these would be two different people, it can’t be true that each of them is us. So how should we regard our relation to these people? I found that a fascinating question. It was this imagined case that drew me into philosophy. Cogito: It is, of course, for your views on personal identity that you are best known in the philosophical world.
    [Show full text]
  • Moore in the Middle Author(S): by Thomas Hurka Source: Ethics, Vol
    Moore in the Middle Author(s): by Thomas Hurka Source: Ethics, Vol. 113, No. 3, Centenary Symposium on G. E. Moore's <italic> Principia Ethica</italic> (April 2003), pp. 599-628 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/345624 . Accessed: 04/03/2014 18:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 142.150.190.39 on Tue, 4 Mar 2014 18:04:53 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Moore in the Middle Thomas Hurka The rhetoric of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, as of not a few philosophy books, is that of the clean break. Moore claims that the vast majority of previous writing on ethics has been misguided and that an entirely new start is needed. In its time, however, the book’s claims to novelty were widely disputed. Reviews in Mind, Ethics, and Journal of Philosophy applauded the clarity of Moore’s criticisms of Mill, Spencer, and others but said they were “not altogether original,” had for the most part “al- ready been brought out by other critics,” and were even “the standard criticisms.”1 To the Mind reviewer, “The book indicates throughout how strongly the author has been affected by Sidgwick’s views.”2 Hastings Rashdall rejected as historically inaccurate Moore’s claim that only Sidg- wick before him had recognized that “good” is indefinable: “To say nothing of writers who (like Mr.
    [Show full text]
  • On What Matters DEREK PARFIT
    ON WHAT MATTERS DEREK PARFIT Draft of 23 January 2009 CONTENTS VOLUME ONE 205,000 525 pages INTRODUCTION Samuel Scheffler 5,000 PREFACE 4,500 SUMMARY 13,500 PART ONE REASONS 50,000 CHAPTER 1 NORMATIVE CONCEPTS 1 Sufficient and Decisive Reasons 2 Reason-Involving Goodness CHAPTER 2 OBJECTIVE THEORIES 3 Two Kinds of Theory 4 Responding to Reasons 5 State-given Reasons 6 Hedonic Reasons 2 7 Irrational Preferences CHAPTER 3 SUBJECTIVE THEORIES 8 Subjectivism about Reasons 9 Why People Accept Subjective Theories 10 Analytical Subjectivism 11 The Agony Argument CHAPTER 4 FURTHER ARGUMENTS 12 The All or Nothing Argument 13 The Incoherence Argument 14 Reasons, Motives, and Well-Being 15 Arguments for Subjectivism CHAPTER 5 RATIONALITY 16 Practical and Epistemic Rationality 17 Beliefs about Reasons 18 Other Views about Rationality CHAPTER 6 MORALITY 19 Sidgwick’s Dualism 20 The Profoundest Problem CHAPTER 7 MORAL CONCEPTS 21 Acting in Ignorance or with False Beliefs 22 Other Kinds of Wrongness PART TWO PRINCIPLES 34,000 CHAPTER 8 POSSIBLE CONSENT 3 23 Coercion and Deception 24 The Consent Principle 25 Reasons to Give Consent 26 A Superfluous Principle? 27 Actual Consent 28 Deontic Beliefs 29 Extreme Demands CHAPTER 9 MERELY AS A MEANS 30 The Mere Means Principle 31 As a Means and Merely as a Means 32 Harming as a Means CHAPTER 10 RESPECT AND VALUE 33 Respect for Persons 34 Two Kinds of Value 35 Kantian Dignity 36 The Right and the Good 37 Promoting the Good CHAPTER 11 FREE WILL AND DESERT 38 The Freedom that Morality Requires 39 Why We Cannot
    [Show full text]